Meet New York’s Most New York Newspaper!
Plus! Funeral Cookbooks!! Items of Interest!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #185 of CAFÉ ANNE!
I was pleased to learn that last week’s story about NYC’s two church-based Viking cafés inspired reader Sachi in the East Village to check out the $5 rice porridge special served at Norwegian church on Saturdays. She and her husband, it seems, have an “ongoing project” to travel the world by eating every country’s cuisine within NYC’s five boroughs (such a great idea!). “We’d checked off 77 countries so far, but we were missing Norway,” she wrote me over the weekend.
Her report?
“At the church, we met Eirik, who welcomed us in and pointed us toward a big vat of rice porridge. It was self-serve, as were the toppings: cinnamon sugar, raisins, and butter. It’s like oatmeal, but better. When Eirik asked if we liked it, he looked genuinely surprised at our enthusiastic yes. He said it could go either way: ‘It’s very bland.’”
Haha! Sounds like Eirik.
Sachi, by the way, writes the very excellent NYC Politics 101 Substack newsletter, which you should definitely check out.
Last week’s feature story also naturally led to a discussion in the comments section about church food and food eaten at funerals. I don’t know about you, but death makes me very hungry! Are there funeral food cookbooks, I wondered?
Sure enough, there are several on the market! Some notables:
• The Southern Sympathy Cookbook: Funeral Foods With a Twist. I love this book’s tagline, “Heavy bites for the heavy-hearted.” And the recipes—biscuit cinnamon rolls, fried chicken, deviled eggs—totally worth dying for!
• A Comforting Cookbook: Show You Care with the Best Comforting Foods to Make & Take to a Funeral. Sample recipe: Guacamole Appetizer Squares. What?
• Food to Die for: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips and Tales from the Old City Cemetery. Includes recipes for “Bookstore Punch” and “Sweet Briar Cookies.” Plus: “Practical advice for writing obituaries.”
• Funeral Cookbook - Alan Davidson (1924 - 2003). Who is Alan Davidson? A man in England who had a cookbook of his favorite recipes distributed at his own funeral service. It was later reprinted by a friend. According to the description, the book includes “An unpublished letter to the Times on marmalade and then recipes for Greek fish, fricasseed skate, Con’s mince, Greek chicken, toad in the hole, epicure’s kidneys, waterzooi, meat loaf, smothered cabbage, aubergine gratin, fried zucchini, Tabitha Tickletooth’s bread and butter pudding, apple crumble tart, trifle, fluffy tapioca pudding and Susan’s grape dessert.”
In other news, commenting on last week’s mini feature about bonkers pumpkin spice products including food for hermit crabs, reader Chris H. in Yonkers wrote, “No Pumpkin Spice strain yet? TF.” But of course, that exists too. There are dozens of online dispensaries selling pumpkin spice weed, it turns out. I think this is a fantastic development. Let the pumpkin spice crowd team up with the pot heads and leave the rest of us alone!
Finally, huge mayoral election shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Daniel K., Megan C., Owen K., Bob M. and MK. That’s enough $$$ to launch my own 2029 campaign!
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve an interview with the publisher of a crazy new Brooklyn newspaper and some fantastic items of interest. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
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DEPT OF INSANE MEDIA
New York’s Most New York Newspaper—it’s NOT the NY Post!
I was scrolling the Brooklyn forum on Reddit recently when I came across an intriguing photo posted by a fellow Brooklynite. It was a shot of a new newspaper spotted in Sunset Park. “Shoutout to hyperlocal newspapers,” he wrote.
Whoa. Not only had someone just launched a new, free community newspaper—a crazy thing to do in 2025—the publication had a print edition, which is even crazier. Plus, the stories were in three different languages—English, Chinese and Spanish! Who was behind this madness?
A Google search for The Sunset Post turned up the publication’s website. The tagline: “Sunset Park’s Hyperlocal, Trilingual Newspaper.” It offered dozens of stories about neighborhood politics, schools, businesses, transit, crime and events—even a regular nature feature, “Birds of Sunset Park.” But the “About” page didn’t say who was behind it. Curious, I sent a query using the site’s contact form.
I got a speedy reply from Lorenzo Tijerina who, I later learned, is not only the newspaper’s founder and publisher, but also the editor, photographer, web manager, ad salesperson, graphic designer and main delivery man. The Sunset Post is essentially a one-man operation, run out of the one-bedroom apartment Lorenzo shares with his wife and ten-year-old son. I had to meet this guy!
“Would you be available to chat about your paper?” I wrote. “I’d like to talk about why you launched, why you decided to go trilingual, why you’re publishing a print edition, etc.”
“All those are questions I’m asking myself every day,” he responded.
We agreed to meet at the Yafa Café on Fourth Avenue, Lorenzo’s regular hangout. I was happy to see, upon meeting him, that he looks like a newspaper editor—whatever that means. And he’d brought the new October edition of his publication featuring headlines such as “Charter high school launches on Fifth Avenue.”
At the café, we exchanged a few pleasantries before I hit him with my hardball question: “So you launched a community, trilingual newspaper—with a print edition—in 2025,” I said. “I was going to ask, ‘How crazy is that?’ But seeing you have a sense of humor, I’ll ask a different question: How stupid is that?”
“Yeah, it’s crazy,” said Lorenzo, scanning the front page of his paper, with its hodgepodge of fonts, colors, languages and QR codes. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Every day I’m like, ‘Why?’ I mean, look at this. This is insane. What are we doing?”
He paused and reflected. “So, the question was, ‘How stupid?’ Very stupid!”
Lorenzo, who just turned 50, launched the paper two months ago, in August, for the reason all great ventures start: he couldn’t stop himself.
He moved to Sunset Park in 2012 and was always exploring the neighborhood, wondering about the stories behind what he saw. But the community had no newspaper.
“I’m a curious person, and this is a way to get those answers,” he said. “It’s just an excuse to be a nosy person: ‘What’s going on here?’”
He was also driven by a desire to provide a common bond for the residents of his neighborhood, a huge swath of Brooklyn that includes English-speaking natives, folks from Mexico populating the lower avenues, and along Eighth Avenue, immigrants from Hong Kong and China’s Fujian province creating the city’s second-largest Chinatown.
“It was something that the neighborhood was missing,” he said of The Sunset Post. “I felt like it was something that the community might want because I wanted it.”
And he was, in a way, made for the job. He got his start as a reporter for a bilingual paper in San Antonio before expanding into television. He moved to Brooklyn in 2006 for the usual reason: “I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I wanted to move to New York, and I don’t know, live the dream, or whatever.”
Which he did, sort of! He pursued freelance writing, photography and video editing and taught an after-school film program for kids in Harlem. When the pandemic hit and work dried up, he joined a friend’s accounting business in Queens. Looking to pivot, he enrolled in a coding bootcamp and graduated in 2023—just as ChatGPT launched, wiping out all the entry-level coding jobs. But at least now he knew how to build a website.
Lorenzo’s main inspiration for The Sunset Post was the Red Hook Star-Revue, a community paper serving nearby Red Hook and Gowanus run by its founder and editor George Fiala.
“I would look at that newspaper often, and one point I was just like, ‘If he can do it, I can do it!’” said Lorenzo.
George advised Lorenzo on every aspect of the business. The two use the same printer and every month, George drives Lorenzo—who does not have a car—two hours to a small town in New Jersey to pick up his print run of 4,000.
“We leave at ten at night because he works until that time, and he likes to listen to Grateful Dead,” said Lorenzo. “And he just talks about journalism the whole time—writing and newspapers and stories and people and politics—and then we pick up the newspapers, load them up and he brings me back. Who would do that? Most people won’t even take you to the airport.”
The next step is to hand-deliver the Post to the 70-odd Sunset Park businesses—bodegas, pizzerias, laundromats—that distribute the paper for free. “I have a wagon that I’m borrowing from my friend Greg,” said Lorenzo.
“You don’t even have your own wagon!” I said.
“I did,” said Lorenzo. “But the wheel broke.”
Printing and delivering is the easy part of publishing a community newspaper, of course. Lorenzo reports and writes about half the 20-odd stories he posts every week on his website. He’s also managing a dozen free-lance reporters and columnists. And then there’s the work of translating every story into three languages.
“How is the translation done?” I wondered.
“Well, me and ChatGPT!” said Lorenzo.
It’s not as simple as feeding text into the bot and using whatever it spits out in Spanish and Chinese. Lorenzo uses a custom-trained model, and there’s a lot of back-and-forth on every paragraph, both with the chatbot and the original writer. “It’s very tedious,” he said.
And it’s perhaps too much work for one person. In the two weeks leading up to publishing the October issue, Lorenzo worked from 4 am to 10 pm every day. “I need to relax a bit, or I’ll get burned out,” he said, perhaps stating the obvious.
So what does it cost to launch a community weekly? Not as much as you’d think. Lorenzo said the print run costs $1600 a month, and he’s paying his free-lance writers $100 per story. The rest is sweat equity.
On the other hand, the business isn’t making much money yet. The October issue carried six advertisers including two restaurants, an Aikido studio and two city council candidates. Rates are $450 for a half page of the print edition and $80 for an online ad.
Audience building is another challenge. Lorenzo said that on a typical day, the website gets about 60 readers. (That number doesn’t worry me—when I started this newsletter in 2021, it took several months to attract a few hundred subscribers.)
The reception so far? Lorenzo said he’s been met by hugs and tears on the street from folks who are grateful for the publication. Stories about local businesses, a recent immigrant job fair and a free sailing program proved especially popular.
“This story was probably not a great decision,” he added, leafing through the paper. The article he referred to was about the weirdly generic signs a number of Chinese restaurants on Eighth Avenue had plastered on their front windows which, it turns out, were designed to hide illegal slot machines from public view. “So I lost a lot of potential advertisers with that one,” he said.
“And how do you feel now overall?” I asked.
“I wake up early, every morning, out of anxiety,” said Lorenzo. “I try to sleep as long as I can, but eventually, by five o’clock, who am I kidding? And then, as it gets closer to the end of the month, that time gets early and earlier. Does that answer your question?”
“But don’t you feel fulfilled, now now you’re living the dream?” I prodded.
“No, not at all!” said Lorenzo. “I have a sensei, and he’s just like, ‘Be proud of yourself.’ But no, not yet. What are you talking about? We’ve got to figure this out. Maybe next month.”
He’ll feel he’s succeeded, he said, when the paper is financially stable and publishing weekly. He also has his eye on renting the former rotisserie chicken restaurant down the street on Fourth Avenue. “I’d like that spot as a little office, a storefront where writers can come, where people can come with their complaints,” he said. “You know, like a sitcom.”
But momentum is definitely building. This past weekend, he held his first team meeting of freelance writers and photographers—mostly folks who write in different languages—and ten people showed up.
“Do you think your newspaper is the most New York newspaper?” I asked, feeling that the answer was definitely yes.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Lorenzo. “But it’s the most Sunset Park newspaper for sure!
ITEMS OF INTEREST
World’s Largest Cashew Tree Covers 1.8 Acres
When New Yorkers Spot Dolphins
CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
Wow, that story about Lorenzo and the Sunset Post is so inspiring/bonkers/hilarious/awesome. And that George drives him two hours each way at 10pm at night!? What an amazing person. I live in Budapest but at the moment I'm reading stories about Sunset Park.
It warms my heart to see community journalism alive & thriving. Lorenzo has heart!
Anne, thank you for introducing us to good people doing good work in the world.